​Buddhism, Spiritualism and Theosophy

At the turn of the 20th century Spiritualism, Transcendentalism and Theosophy were quite popular among well-educated urban Australians, and Spiritualist and Theosophical bookshops in Melbourne stocked many books on so-called Eastern traditions, including Buddhism. In 1891, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, who co-founded the Theosophical Society (TS) with Madame Blavatsky, first toured Australia lecturing on ‘Theosophy and Buddhism’. They had taken refuge in Sri Lanka in May 1880, and were ‘great trail-blazers for Buddhism’ in the West and in Asia. Emma Harding Britten, an American Theosophist, had earlier visited Australia in 1978 and established the first branch of the TS in Tasmania in 1889. Elise Pickett, a Russian women from New Zealand, set up the Melbourne TS in 1990, and is described as being perhaps the first “‘White Buddhist’ to have set forth on Australian shores’, with Olcott most probably the second (Croucher 1989: 6-9).Alfred Deakin, who was later to become a three-time Australian Prime Minister, chaired Olcott’s 1891 Melbourne lectures. Deakin read widely in Theosophy, Vedanta and Buddhism, travelled to Sri Lanka and India in 1890, and was highly active in the TS until 1896. Olcott toured Australia again in 1897, however the number of Buddhists in Australia and Victoria declined substantially, and interest in Buddhism waned, after the introduction of the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act, known as the White Australia Policy (Croucher 1989: 10-13). The 1901 Census recorded 4, 807 Buddhists in Victoria and this number steadily decreased to only 177 by 1933 (Adam & Hughes 1996: 41).